Sect Year 2 · seventh month · night of day 12 · the twenty-fourth life: the granary on the Ardun plain, Edrin’s nineteenth year
The rains came back in the year Edrin turned nineteen. They came in a grey wind from the north, and for a whole season the line did not exist. Edrin stood at the granary step with the ladle in his hand and no one to fill, and the yard was so quiet that he could hear the water running off the roof into the gutter. Haskel sat on his pallet by the door and listened to it too.
“Well,” said the old keeper. “Now you find out what the granary’s for.”
“Feeding people.”
“Keeping. Feeding is what you do when they come up the road. Keeping is what you do the rest of the time.” Haskel closed his eyes. “Sift the seed-corn. Count the weevils. Don’t let anyone tell you the barrels are full when they’re only heavy.”
Haskel died in the second spring after the rains, in the afternoon, with the door open and the wind coming in off the wet plain. Edrin buried him below the threshing floor. There, the ground was soft enough to dig, and he didn’t carve a name on the stone, because nobody had ever asked him to keep one.
